We Are the Bollards by Mark Steyn on Australia
https://www.steynonline.com/8340/we-are-the-bollards
So there will be more empty seats round the Christmas table this year, after an “Australian citizen” mowed down pedestrians at the junction of Flinders Street and Elizabeth Street in Melbourne. The casualties include “a pre-schooler with serious head injuries”. The “Australian citizen” (I presume this designation is being used to emphasize that he’s entirely eligible to serve in Mr Turnbull’s cabinet) did it deliberately, but relax, lighten up, there’s no need to worry because, according to Victoria’s police commissioner, all this terrifying terror is “not terror-related“. So he’s not a crack operative with the Islamic State’s Australian branch office, he’s just, as The Age‘s cheery headline writer puts it, “of Afghan descent and mentally ill”. A second man, arrested while filming the scene and found to have three knives in his bag, is believed to be nothing to do with the first man. Just another Australian citizen taking his knife collection out for a stroll. You’ll recall there was a previous “vehicle attack” in downtown Melbourne earlier this year, after which the authorities ordered up the bollardization of every pedestrianized precinct in the vicinity. As Andrew Bolt writes:
After the Halloween jihadist killed eight people on a bike path in Lower Manhattan, New York’s bollardizers commanded similarly extravagant installation of Diversity Bollards up and down the city. As I wrote:
I was over-thinking the issue. One of the problems with bollarding off pedestrians behind a wall of Diversity Bollards is that they still occasionally have to emerge from behind the bollards to cross the street, and it’s hard to bollard off a pedestrian crossing. In this case, the non-terror-related Australian citizen simply waited until the little green sign indicated it was safe for pedestrians to cross the street and then floored it. In an amusing touch, his car eventually came to a rest against a bollard. What’s the solution? Maybe automobile manufacturers could replace airbags with Diversity Bollards timed to inflate whenever non-terror-related drivers with mental-health issues accelerate near pedestrian crossings. Or perhaps it would be easier to issue citizens of western nations at birth with an individual ring of bollards to wear about their persons at all time, starting with when they leave the maternity ward. Alternatively, instead of attempting to ring-fence every potential target – ie, everything and everyone – with Diversity Bollards, we could try installing bollards where they matter – around the civilized world. To reiterate what I reiterated last time:
~Speaking of non-terror-related Muslims, there’s a hot new hashtag trending in Britain called #AVeryMerryMuslimChristmas. This derives from the title of a new report by Westminster’s All-Party Parliamentary Group on British Muslims. “A Very Merry Muslim Christmas” purports to demonstrate that almost all Christian charity in fact comes from Muslims:
Yeah, you Islamophobes thought that the “Muslim Merry Christmas” consisted of shooting up churches in Egypt and Pakistan, and mowing down shoppers in Berlin markets and Melbourne intersections, and self-detonating at Port Authority Bus Terminal. But you’ve got it all wrong: Allah is the reason for the season. Without him, this whole Christmas thing would be a total bust. I have written before of Islam’s need to control the public space. Sometimes that means homicidally so – as in Melbourne and New York and Berlin and Nice and London Bridge and Westminster Bridge… But there is also a slyer and in some ways more provocative pressure to dominate the public square. As I wrote a couple of November 11ths back:
There’s something deeply narcissistic about this: Just as every Muslim terror attack is really about the entirely imaginary anti-Muslim backlash that never comes, so everything else has to be about Islam, too. In some ways, “A Very Merry Muslim Christmas” is an even more audacious act of narcissism. Yet the same PC policemen that think sensitive retailers should say “Happy Holidays” and municipalities should hold “Winter Festivals” are delighted by #AVeryMerryMuslimChristmas and are hashtagging up a storm. If the novelist Lionel Shriver wears a sombrero in Brisbane that’s “cultural appropriation”, but “A Very Merry Muslim Christmas” is just heartwarming and inclusive. No “appropriation” to see here – are you paranoid or something? Exactly a decade ago, I wrote in Maclean’s (which has since hosed the link):
On the evidence of the fawning approval of #AVeryMerryMuslimChristmas from British MPs, university profs, Fleet Street columnists, minor celebrities, Anglican clerics, etc, the competition for that title is pretty intense. Almost everyone who matters in the west’s ruling class thinks that the solution to Muslim terrorism is things like a Merry Muslim Christmas. No, it’s not: That’s just a way to get to the same unhappy ending with fewer body parts.
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